Talk:The Green Buffalo
Dragon's Teeth The Crichton Estate just posthumously released a novel dealing with the Bone Wars and told from the perspective of a young paleontology student who gets caught in the crossfire between Marsh and Cope. Naturally I thought of this. Much as I'd love for the creator of Jurassic Park et al to give that subject matter the sci fi treatment, apparently it's straight historical fiction. From the review I read, the protagonist narrowly escapes riding to his doom with Custer and gunfights in Deadwood and all manner of horse opera clichés, but the dinosaurs stay fossilized. So it sounds like it's more along the lines of The Great Train Robbery, which is not a bad thing either. I can't help being suspicious about this release. According to the estate, when Crichton died he had one finished or nearly finished book ready to go (2009's Pirate Latitudes) and one unfinished manuscript (2011's Micro) which they turned over to a hack writer who tried to jump-start his career the easy way by shamelessly filling the story with sequel hooks that no one ever took up. Each of those is perfectly believable. But the idea that Crichton had another finished book just sitting around (there's no co-author credited on this one) that went completely unnoticed all these years sounds fishy. I can't help wondering if this is someone else's effort to make a quick buck by slapping a name to be reckoned with onto a counterfeit and giving it a fabricated backstory to attract the curious. Didn't stop me from buying the book, alas. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:22, May 26, 2017 (UTC) :More likely, Crichton wrote the first draft at some point in the deep past, thought to himself "Huh, this kinda sucks. Maybe I'll do a rewrite one of these days. Or I'll just leave it my trunk.". TR (talk) 04:41, May 26, 2017 (UTC) ::That could be too. Either way, I wish they'd let him rest in peace. Still, I'll read it. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:51, May 26, 2017 (UTC) Other TUD stories Robert Silverberg's contribution to The Ultimate Dinosaur can be read here. Alot of the stories in TUD are just feeble rip offs of "A Sound of Thunder." Bradbury even contributes a story which is not like ASoT but is quite similar to alot of his earlier tales, and L. Sprague de Camp provides a Reggie Rivers tale which was later collected in Rivers of Time. The Rivers series started off as a ripoff of ASoT, but got really funny and lively as it went on.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 21:30, October 3, 2019 (UTC) Trike or Toro? Rereading the story, I think it is a Triceratops (which is discussed frequently) rather than a Torosaurus (a name which isn't mentioned once). This is a simple, one-layered story, which wouldn't ask us to find subtle clues that it's a Toro rather than a Trike. I think we should use Occam's razor to assume that since the story only talks about Trikes, the creature is a Trike. If it's a Trike, then the frontispiece depicts the Green Buffalo correctly. However, the animal in the top left corner is out of place. HT never gives any indication that there was a second cryptid present, and the creature shown is wrong for the Cretaceous. It appears to be a Permian or Triassic predator, possibly Dimetrodon or one of its close relatives.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 18:12, October 17, 2019 (UTC)